Lions vs. Tigers

The precarious state of Sri Lanka

By Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant & Joanne D.
Eisen

March 03, 2004, 9:18 a.m., National Review Online. More by Kopel on
Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is technically in a state of
civil war. It is just barely held together by a tenuous ceasefire
that is splintering day by day, threatening to dash the hopes of a
country that yearns for peace. Last month,
President Chandrika Kumaratunga dissolved parliament and called
for new elections to be held on April 2 — almost four years earlier
than expected. Kumaratunga thereby sabotaged what had once been
promising negotiations between the government of Sri Lanka
(controlled by the island's majority Buddhist population) and the
Tamil Tigers (a Hindu minority). A canny politician, Kumaratunga
would not have taken such as bold step unless she expected to win.
This is, apparently, a move toward intensifying the civil war.

Sri Lanka's constitution provides for both a prime minister and a
president; when the two belong to philosophically opposed political
parties, the condition is termed "cohabitation." It seems it was
just cohabitation that halted the peace process that might have
ended 20 years of civil war.

Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe and his party
have been willing to make compromises in order to achieve a lasting
peace. On the other hand, President Kumaratunga and her party, the
People's Alliance, have resisted concessions to the Tamil Tiger
insurgency. If the new elections give decisive power to Kumaratunga,
the scene will be set for nullification of the 2002 ceasefire.
Kumaratunga is officially committed to the original ceasefire, but
her
allies are now complaining that "the ceasefire with Tamil Tiger
rebels threatens national security."

But that depends on who defines "security."

Located 22 miles off the southern tip of India, the island nation
of Sri Lanka (population 19 million) is approximately the size of
West Virginia. Its capital, Colombo, lies on the southwest coast.
The nation was called Ceylon when it gained independence from Great
Britain in 1948; the name was changed to the Democratic Socialist
Republic of Sri Lanka (which means "resplendent island") when it
adopted a new constitution in 1972. It remains an independent member
of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Ceylon became a British colony in 1796. But long before the British
arrived, the country consisted of two separate cultures, each with
its own language, religion, and customs. The majority is composed of
Sinhalese, who live in the west, south, and center of the island.
Their name means "of the lions," and they are primarily Buddhist.

Tamils (primarily Hindu) make up a smaller portion of the
population, and have traditionally lived in the east and north. Many
Tamils from India were relocated into Sinhalese areas by the British
during the early 19th century, nearly doubling the number of Tamils
on the island. They were employed as cheap laborers on the tea
plantations. At the time of independence, there were about 4.6
million Sinhalese and 1.5 million Tamils.

When the British withdrew from Ceylon, they left democratic
institutions and a British-style parliamentary form of government.
What transpired soon afterward is a perfect example of how democracy
does not always produce stability or equity.

Almost from the moment of independence, Sri Lanka's democratically
elected government discriminated against the Tamil minority. For
example, the
Citizenship Act of 1948 disenfranchised the descendants of
Indian Tamil laborers brought in by the British, people who had been
living in Ceylon for more than a century. A million Tamils were
given a choice: accept citizenship in a foreign country, India, or
live as strangers in their own land. For decades afterward,
these people lived in limbo.

The 1948 Citizenship Act increased Sinhalese control of government
relative to the Tamils. In 1947, the Sinhalese controlled parliament
by 67 percent; by 1952 they had 73 percent. The Sinhalese gains
paved the way for additional discriminatory legislation against the
Tamils.

Take, for example, the Official Language Act, which became law in
1956. Known as the
Sinhala-only Act,
it mandated that "the Sinhala language shall be the one official
language of Ceylon." The law was intended to remedy a "problem":
Because Tamils were more proficient in English — the language of
government, inherited from the colonial era — they were
disproportionately employed in government service. The Sinhala-only
Act gave the Sinhalese an advantage, for they could now conduct
official business in their native language. Since the act also
required that children be educated in their birth language, it
caused a sharp decline in employment opportunities for Tamils in
public service and further reduced their political power.

There was also the
Offensive Weapons Act of 1966, which attempted to ensure that
the passive, generally unarmed Tamil minority would so remain: "Any
person who, except with lawful authority . . . possesses . . . any
offensive weapon. . . shall be guilty of an offence. . . punishable
with imprisonment . . . for a term not exceeding ten years, and also
with a fine not exceeding ten thousand rupees, and may in addition
be punished with whipping."

Educational opportunities for Tamils were profoundly diminished by
discriminatory policies. Because a disproportionately high number of
Tamil students attended institutions of higher learning, the merit
system was replaced with preferential treatment for Sinhalese
students. The result was a large pool of bright, young, unemployed
Tamil high school graduates, shut out from opportunities for higher
education and government employment.

Sri Lanka's 1972 constitution proclaimed Buddhism as the state
religion, causing great concern to Hindu Tamils. In 1976, the
Vaddukoddai Resolution was drafted by the Tamils in response.
The resolution enumerated grievances against the Sinhalese, and
declared independence for
Tamil Eelam, the
name for the traditional Tamil homeland within Sri Lanka.

The Sinhalese excuse for persecution of the Tamils was a paranoid
fear of annihilation. During the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., the
Sinhalese suffered severely from repeated invasions by South Indian
Tamils. As an October 1981 issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review
noted: "Antipathy between Sinhalas and Tamils is rooted
as much in history as in a peculiar schizophrenia afflicting
both....Despite their clear majority, Sinhalas fear the large
numbers of foreign Tamils who, including those in India's [state of]
Tamil Nadu, are said to number around 50-60 million between
Southeast Asia through Middle East to the Caribbean. On the other
hand Ceylon Tamils, despite being only 11.2 percent of the
population, consider themselves strong in terms of the global Tamil
brotherhood."

Responding hysterically to massive but peaceful demonstrations by
the Tamils — whose role model was Mohandas Gandhi — the government
fomented violence against the Tamils. Some of the anti-Tamil riots
had a level and intensity that appeared to the Tamils reminiscent of
Kristalnacht. The Tamils were increasingly radicalized by the
Sinhalese violence.

Civil war finally broke out in 1983, when race riots incited by the
Sinhalese government killed many Tamil civilians. Ignoring the
Offensive Weapons Act, and with the help of funding from Tamils
abroad, Tamils began to arm themselves.

For a brief time, India was drawn into the conflict. Indian Tamils,
separated from Sri Lanka only by the narrow Palk Strait, pressured
their own government to intervene. But the Indian government
recognized that if a million and a half Tamils in Sri Lanka could
create their own nation, so could the 55 million Tamils in India.
Thus, India did nothing to aid the political aspirations of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), nicknamed the "Tamil
Tigers." In the summer of 1987, an Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF)
was sent into Sri Lanka to disarm the Tamil Tigers.
The fierce
resistance it encountered was wholly unexpected.

Beaten badly, in what the Pakistan Institute of Defence Studies
called "India's Vietnam," India withdrew the last of its 50,000
troops from Sri Lanka in March 1990. India's superior forces could
not prevail over small arms in the hands of a determined,
beleaguered people, fighting for their ancestral lands.

In the early 1980s, the poorly trained and poorly armed Sri Lankan
military numbered 12,000. A decade later, its ranks had swelled to
five times that number, and the army enjoyed better training and
better equipment. By May 2000, the Sri Lankan government was
fielding more than 100,000 troops in an effort to subdue what had
started as a civilian sit-in. And it was spending between
$850
million and
$1 billion a year to prosecute the war.

The LTTE, with financial help from Tamils overseas, evolved into a
formidable force, staying "several technological steps ahead of the
Sri Lankan military." The Tamil Tigers "had rocket-propelled grenade
launchers and night-vision glasses." They "pioneered the battlefield
use of off-the-shelf civilian technologies — for example, in
learning how to accurately target projectiles with Global
Positioning Satellite signals." Nevertheless, "the bulk of the
Tigers' arsenal [was] made up of small arms."

By 2002, the Tamil Tigers had created a fighting force of 10,000
men who used terrorist tactics that included everything from suicide
bombings to surface-to-air missiles.Women and children
participated in the fighting. In late 2002, the LTTE agreed to cease
child recruitment.

Credible accusations of atrocities against the civilian population
have been lodged by both sides. In January 1998, the LTTE attacked
Sri Lanka's holiest Buddhist shrine, the Temple of the Tooth. 13
people were killed.

More typically, though, the Tamil Tigers have confined their
attacks to military targets, infrastructure, and political figures,
including President Kumaratunga. For example, using only small
arms and explosives, the LTTE carried out a spectacular raid in July
2001 on a Sri Lankan military base just north of Colombo and on the
nearby Bandaranaike Airport, Sri Lanka's only international airport.
The raid cost the Sri Lankan government a billion dollars in
damages, and destroyed eight military aircraft.

In
Migrations and Cultures, Thomas Sowell wrote, "As the
national army — overwhelmingly Sinhalese — was sent into the Tamil
areas of the north to restore order, in practice it spread the
disorder, engaging in indiscriminate killings of Tamil civilians in
retaliation for Tamil guerilla ambushes or fatal land-mine
explosions. When guerillas killed 13 soldiers in a 1983 ambush, for
example, Sinhalese troops retaliated by pulling 20 Tamils off a bus
and killing them. When Sinhalese troops suffered large casualties
from land-mine explosions, they sometimes massacred whole Tamil
settlements, or at least all the young males."

A 1999 U.N. study noted that "since 1980, 12,000 Sri Lankans have
gone missing after being detained by security forces." According to
the U.N., the number of disappearances in Sri Lanka was second only
to those in Iraq. In 2000, two British MEPs accused the government
of Sri Lanka of "not allowing essential supplies, including baby
food and medicine, to be distributed in areas controlled by the
Tamil Tigers."

After decades of war, the Tamil Tigers could not win. They could not
hold all their territory, and their capital city of Jaffna was still
controlled by the Sri Lankan army. Yet, at the same time, the
Sinhalese had lost. They may have been in token control on the
ground in Jaffna, but just barely, and the Tigers had shown that
they could, with impunity, attack the national capital of Colombo.
The drain on Sri Lanka's economy was unbearable, especially with the
country facing bankruptcy, a military stalemate, and the
desertion
of up to 25 percent of Sri Lanka's armed forces.

Both sides were forced to the bargaining table. Everyone yielded.
The Sri Lankan government made two major concessions: The
terrorist ban on the LTTE was lifted, and the LTTE was not
required to surrender its arms in order for the peace process to go
forward. President Kumaratunga stated: "We were not asking for
laying down of arms . . . or anything like that. We just said come
for talks and we can see what we can agree to."

In turn, the Tamil Tigers dropped their demand for a separate
nation, and indicated their willingness to accept a political
solution involving autonomy within Sri Lanka.

However, the People's Alliance, the party of President Kumaratunga,
has the constitutional power to scuttle the peace process, and has
been attempting to do so. It reneged on the promise of Tamil
autonomy, and demanded that the rebels disarm. Lakshman Kadirgamar,
a senior PA figure, was emphatic: "Decommissioning must be taken up
immediately . . . We will never accept a situation where a political
solution is sought first and decommissioning later."

Politically, disarmament creates a Catch-22 for the LTTE. If the
Tamil Tigers do not acquiesce, the global opinion elite, who want to
disarm so-called "non-state actors" (such as freedom fighters), will
blame the LTTE for the failure of the peace talks. The concept that
only governments should have weapons will be reinforced. But by
disarming, the Tamil Tigers would acknowledge their loss of
sovereignty, and be forced to accept a peace deal dictated by a
government that has never exhibited good will toward them. The
Tamils could expect no help from overseas governments.

Regardless of the outcome of the peace process, the Sri Lankan
government will never control the Tamils, because the Tamils'
weapons have provided them de facto independence, what the
Tamils call "internal self-determination." As the BBC observed, "In
the areas they control the Tamil Tigers run a parallel government,
with their own police and judiciary...the Tigers own police force
can even be found implementing day to day issues such as speed
restrictions on roads."

The Tamils are living their demands for "internal
self-determination." Instead of waiting for a formal peace treaty,
the Tamils have already begun
rebuilding for
the future — schools and hospitals, roads, water systems, and
power grids. If the Tamils exercise restraint and keep their end of
the original ceasefire bargain, they will cultivate favorable world
opinion, despite having been formerly labeled "terrorists."

President Kumaratunga and her allies are furious over their loss
of control of the Tamils, and may see a renewal of violence as their
best option. If so, the world should condemn them as the real
terrorists.

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